How To Manufacture A Right Little B*****d (From Scratch)
A handy guide to creating a ‘dysfunctional yet successful’ adult in the modern world
One thing about the human race is certain. We breed. We love breeding, barely twenty minutes after its inception, we dedicated half the internet to sex and the continuation and survival of our species.
Before the Googlopoly everything back then was at the behest of an elderly gentleman named Jeeves (1996–2010). For those people who care, Jeeves died from exhaustion, fetching porn from the internet’s top shelf for curious internet tourists.
And so the first generation of internet users was born and pretty soon everything went digital. Watches had been digital for a while at this point and it seemed like a bloody good move to go all in. It was an interesting move and threw us into interesting times.
Now that everyone has an opinion about everything, we’re not sure what constitutes success with our children anymore. Parents don’t know if they’re doing the right thing. Helpful advice from paediatricians about raising children has been replaced with a cacophony of contradictory parenting blogs written by enthusiastic amateurs.
Digital hedge-witchery leading directly to the sort of people who don’t believe in vaccinating their children. For the record, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in vaccination or not, measles believes in your child.
Into this mixed quagmire of advice steps one solitary penguin. Ready to imbue all that I’ve learned from a career in teaching and social care.
Take all the following advice at your peril. These are the people entrusted with picking your nursing home after all.
Early Childhood
From the moment they’re born, tiny crotchfruit attempt to engage with the world. They don’t really think about things the way you or I do, they just get too hot, a bit hungry, have trapped wind or crap themselves.
Their default reaction to any of these problems is to cry loudly and elicit assistance from adults around them. Over time they will learn the world is a safe place and that support arrives when they wail.
At some point, they will start to practice using their facial muscles and when they accidentally grimace they will be rewarded with cooing and Grandma taking 200+ photos. They love the attention and practice this grimace a lot.
That’s pretty much how smiling works. But you don’t want a smiling kid.
To make a successful child in the digital age, you need to spend as much time on your phone as possible. Ask Jeeves is long dead, but Solitaire is still kicking around. Any time your baby needs comfort, ensure that you’re busy checking your social media. This is vital for their well-being and your sanity.
Be as inconsistent as possible and when put under parenting pressure, work solely on your tweets. Ensure that your child needs to compete for your attention. Make them work as hard as they can to draw your eyes away from that glowing and blinking screen.
That fierce sense of competition mixed with low self-worth will engender personality traits they’ll find come in handy later on.
If you can, maintain a complete emotional absence at the point your child cries, this will pay literal dividends in the future from your share portfolio. Put some headphones on and be assured your child will stop crying once they learn it doesn’t work as a survival strategy.
Nature doesn’t favour the loud primate without protection. Tarzan and The Jungle Book are both lies, those kids would be dead within minutes, not raised by chimps, wolves and a laissez-faire bear.
Ignore your child and hey presto they’re regulating their emotions themselves.
When they turn into adults that might mean drink, drugs, porn or work addiction. You’ve seen ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ and high functioning alcoholics and drug addicts are a right giggle.
This is what business success looks like. These are your blueprints.
If you can’t help but respond to the crying because you’re soft or you don’t own decent headphones, learn to be unpredictable with your response. In order to obtain your protection and love, a child will learn to escalate their behaviour.
They’ll become wild, erratic and perhaps a little bratty. They will be tough to parent. Totally worth it in the long run.
They may have emotional problems, toxic relationships, violent tendencies, and self-esteem issues. But at least they’ll win Love Island Series 68. They may go on to create a Youtube channel or be a hugely successful digital mannequin for capitalism, rebranded as ‘influencer’ for clarity.
This is the blueprint for a career in the attention of others, where your only discernible and monetisable talent is being a heightened version of yourself. It starts with an unpredictable childhood, but you can fast track them into TV by buying them a camera when they’re about seven.
In their desperate attempt to elicit positive feelings, they’ll fill that void with the comments and likes of people they don’t know.
The school Years
Once your little bastard can walk and talk it’s time to start interfering with their play. Helicopter parent like your life depends on it. Children use play to work out the complex nuances of social interaction.
If other children won’t share with your child, swoop in like the avenging ghost of Trotsky and redistribute the toys. Ensure your child gets exactly what they want whenever they want it.
You’re trying to stymie the realisation that other people have needs and feelings. This doesn’t encourage success in a very capitalist society, so get in there and trample over the needs of other children on behalf of your special little guy or gal.
Reward behaviour when they get what they want, regardless of how they get it. Teach boys aggression and teach girls manipulation. Real men are men. Big boys don’t cry. If someone hits you hit them back… and never hit girls.
That’ll help foster a baffling sense of confused morality
A total lack of emotional understanding is a prerequisite to being a successful manager. Companies need people who make difficult decisions and can do so very fast. Difficult decisions is a euphemism for firing people.
In order to encourage success, you must encourage your child’s latent sociopathy.
Around middle childhood, you can move from being emotionally volatile and/or emotionally absent into a doting parent. If your child wants something, anything, order it on Amazon Prime. If over breakfast they comment that they’d love a Playstation, buy them one. That day.
Other children are learning to delay gratification, not something you want your kid to have. When Christmas arrives, turn your lounge into an orgy of gifts and stay in bed. Get up for a rant and a turkey sandwich and leave them to it. Spend Boxing day complaining how you haven’t got any money and they should be really grateful.
Under no circumstances put in a pocket money system. That’ll teach them to budget and to buy things only when they can afford them. Don’t do that. That’ll only cause fiscal stability in later life.
Who wants that? Not bankers. Not governments. Not you.
Get this part right and they’ll become adults who impulse buy. Credit cards, payday loans, whatever it takes. The space between wanting something and having it should become infinitesimally short on your watch.
This is exactly how capitalism works and what society needs. Modern economies run on debt and heaven forfend you’ve given birth to a socialist.
The acquisition of useless but expensive tat will become their primary life goal. They’ll work hard in a job they don’t enjoy so they can have a watch that gives them oral sex, or a car that turns into a person.
Everything that can be upgraded will be and they’ll be prepared to upgrade themselves to the breadline.
Teenagers
Give them full access to the internet the second they enter puberty. Don’t put any controls in and let them watch reality TV and pornography with reckless abandon. Never have the sex talk, they can work out the mechanics from hardcore pornography.
Encourage them to pick a few role models from Instagram. Find beautiful airbrushed alien-looking people with sponsorship deals. Got yourself a boy? Keep telling them real men don’t have feelings. Got yourself a girl? Point them in the direction of any Instagram influencer who straddles the line between influencer and soft-core porn star.
Think Kardashian.
Encourage them to understand attractiveness and social status are the same. For boys, this will mean seeing attractive girls as objects they can possess if they earn enough money, for girls, this means critiquing their wardrobe, makeup and body at every turn.
You’re trying to grow them into self-obsession. Create a capitalist vacuum where their personality should be. Fill this gap with branded merchandise at all times. If they start doing well at school and look like they’re going to qualify at something, don’t panic.
Point them back to social media late at night when they feel vulnerable and introduce some mentally ill Youtubers they can use as role models.
Sleep deprivation should foster a narcissistic approach to life that comes with seeing themselves through the lens of everyone else. Don’t let them think about having a separate identity from other people. Reinforce the idea that everything they have and everything they do is being silently judged.
Then refuse to buy them new shoes.
Now is an ideal time to put in a pocket money system, but make sure it’s far too low for their expensive tastes. This should crush any residual self-esteem. Scream ‘I’m not made of money!’ at them whenever they ask for anything.
If they start getting eating disorders or self-medicating with drugs then you’re doing something right. The former shows an iron will and dedication to the cause. The latter will leave plenty of stories for their misery porn blog. As the world sinks into more and more unhappiness, these sorts of stories will sell more and more over the next few years.
Victim? Victcha-ching!
Make sure you push boys towards violent games that glorify survival at all costs with everyone else as the enemy. This is an ideal metaphor for capitalism and doing this on a sofa surrounded by chips and dips is better than actual military training which requires a modicum of self-discipline.
At this stage, it’s very important to tell them they can be anything they want to be. Ignore all evidence to the contrary.
The instant they’re done with school you need to do an immediate handbrake turn. Instead of telling them they can be anything they want to be, insist they need to ‘get a job!’ and berate them for being useless.
Make them believe they’re ready to carve out a niche in the universe, then jam them unceremoniously into an existing hole.
What will this hard work lead to?
Adult children who hate their jobs, resent you and society and lack emotional resilience of any kind. If you’ve got the secret sauce right, they might become cocaine-fuelled bankers, socialites or sociopathic influencers. That’s the dream.
They have become people who attempt to fill their emotional void by the simple acquisition of anything that feels like success. They might not be happy in the conventional sense, but the capitalist state doesn’t need happy people, it needs spenders and influencers.
Marriages might look good on the surface but lack any real emotional connection or intimacy. Their own children will likely be dysfunctional too, creating an uncaring society devoid of people who can’t converse about anything other than themselves and their ‘success’
Over time we will develop a solipsistic society with knee jerk social media outrage about things that upset individual sensibilities. Reality TV about the super-rich as aspiration porn. CEOs of multinational companies with drinking problems, bankers with heavy drug addictions.
An uncaring political elite in it for themselves will emerge. A mental health crisis in our young people will likely follow. A shortage of teachers, doctors, social workers and important care jobs will develop whilst the job market will be flooded with influencers and social media specialists.
In short, a barely functioning society that believes success and wealth are the same things. There’s a lot more nuance to ‘success’ than ‘having money’.
If this isn’t what you want for your children or society, I’d highly recommend doing the opposite of everything suggested above.
Want more tongue in cheek critique of the modern age?